Actions retention now covers checks, runs, and statuses
GitHub has unified the retention policy for workflow metadata, including checks, runs, and statuses, under the existing GitHub Actions retention settings. These records will now be automatically purged based on the same duration configured for artifacts and logs.
Verified State Diff
Impact & Verification Analysis
GitHub Actions users, DevOps engineers, and enterprise administrators managing CI/CD pipelines.
This change provides centralized control over data retention, allowing organizations to better manage storage costs and comply with data governance policies by ensuring metadata does not persist longer than necessary.
Full Fact Overview
Previously, GitHub Actions metadata such as workflow runs, check suites, and status updates were managed under different lifecycle policies than the artifacts and logs generated by those runs. By consolidating these under the global Actions retention setting, GitHub is standardizing data lifecycle management across the platform. This change ensures that metadata is pruned in alignment with user-defined retention periods, reducing long-term storage overhead for historical CI/CD data.